Carnival in Tel Aviv

Hizky Shoham is a cultural historian of Israel and Zionism. He is a research fellow in the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.

“Hizky Shoham combines fastidious attention to historical detail with considerable theoretical sophistication to make an important intervention in our understanding of the history of Zionism. Glancing through the prism of Purim carnivals in Tel Aviv, he reorients our gaze from the rural countryside to the city, as well as from the realm of politics to that of culture. The result is a path-breaking inquiry into Urban Zionism, an important and understudied phenomenon that blends the vaunted nationalist ethos of Zionism and the leisure culture of an emerging major city. All in all, a major contribution from a leading member of the new generation of historians of Zionism.”